I don’t understand much about this but with the people who are on the other side of the coffee morning on Tuesday, I know it will be fun, stimulating and well worth attending!
Nahim Nahidi
Please join us for our next Coffee Morning event …..Risk – to be or not to be.
The UK is moving to a largely DC pension system (and potentially CDC). Ideally, in DC, the investment/decumulation options reflect the risk preferences of citizens, but the industry has a tendency to offer “one-size-fits-all” solutions or “lifecycle funds” that fit nobody.
This session will explore the results of a risk preference survey conducted by Professor Narmin Nahidi of Exeter University.
Dr Narmin Nahidi is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Exeter, where she teaches across finance topics with a focus on degree apprenticeships. With over two decades of combined experience in academia and industry, her research explores the intersection of corporate finance, financial technology (FinTech), and behavioral finance increasingly extending into issues of sustainability, ESG accountability, and climate risk in financial systems.
Narmin’s work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at international conferences. She holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), and a Certified Management & Business Educator (CMBE). She is passionate about equipping future finance professionals with the tools to navigate a rapidly evolving and sustainability-conscious global economy.
Narmin will be joined by Arun Muralidhar and Sid Muralidhar and they will discuss their findings on whether risk preferences differ based on age, gender, education, occupation, religion or even geography.
These results could help improve regulation, product design, innovation for greater retirement security.
If you could please take this anonymous survey (before the event) and share it with friends and family (ideally those not in the pension/financial services industry), it would help them make a fun presentation to the group.
The survey is on this link
We hope you can join whether you’ve taken the survey or not.
You can post this link into your diary
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/33913875966649?p=6KSNjBtX0SKlgxmwoh
I don’t understand these risk preference behavioural surveys either, Henry, as they seem to me divorced from the realities facing decision makers.
We don’t know in advance the probabilities of loss or gain.
I recall participating in one of the esteemed Professor Gordon Clark’s surveys at Oxford’s Saïd Business School in which our time preferences and tolerance for deferred gratification were tested by deciding the number of years we’d have to wait for a particular car. This was at a time when the delay on delivery of a new Morgan sports car was around four years (I gather it’s 6-12 months today).
I told Professor Clark his model was very unrealistic as a test of the basis of real world trustee decisions in the 1990s and early 2000s.
More realistic tests of decision choices should, I would suggest, address margins of safety, liquidity preferences and dealing with uncertainty.
We’d witnessed high real returns on index-linked gilts from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s but that trend was coming to an end.
Later in the 1990s we had to consider the possibility of Euro convergence, then the Dot Com Bubble, and the examples of how to react to significant market value falls in 1974, 1987, 2002 and 2008, the pandemic in 2020, then the emerging LDI crisis in 2022.
I would far rather the academics used real world examples rather than these laboratory-like, stylised questions.
I won’t be attending tomorrow’s webinar.